IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI
We tend to nurse a certain naiveté about what faith means in the face of death. The common notion among us as Christians is that if someone has a genuine faith she should be able to face death without fear or doubt. The implication then of course is that having fear and doubt when one is dying is an indication of a weak faith. While it’s true that many people with a strong faith do face death calmly and without fear, that’s not always the case, nor necessarily the norm.

We can begin with Jesus. Surely he had real faith and yet, in the moments just before his death, he called out in both fear and doubt. His cry of anguish, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me,” came from a genuine anguish that was not, as we sometimes piously postulate, uttered for divine effect, not really meant, but something for us to hear. Moments before he died, Jesus suffered real fear and real doubt. Where was his faith? Well, that depends upon how we understand faith and the specific modality it can take on in our dying.

In her famous study of the stages of dying, Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, suggests there are five stages we undergo in the dying process: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Our first response to receiving a terminal diagnosis is denial – This is not happening! Then when we have to accept that it is happening our reaction is anger – Why me! Eventually, anger gives way to bargaining – How much time can I still draw out of this? This is followed by depression and finally, when nothing serves us any longer, there’s acceptance – I’m going to die. This is all very true.

But in a deeply insightful book, The Grace in Dying, Kathleen Dowling Singh, basing her insights upon the experience of sitting at the bedside of many dying people, suggests there are additional stages: doubt, resignation and ecstasy. Those stages help shed light on how Jesus faced his death.

The night before he died, in Gethsemane, Jesus accepted his death, clearly. But that acceptance was not yet full resignation. That only took place the next day on the cross in a final surrender when, as the Gospels put it, “he bowed his head and gave over his spirit.” And, just before that, he experienced an awful fear that what he had always believed in and taught about God was perhaps not so. Maybe the heavens were empty and maybe what we deem as God’s promises amount only to wishful thinking.
But, as we know, he didn’t give into that doubt but rather, inside of its darkness, gave himself over in trust. Jesus died in faith – though not in what we often naively believe faith to be. To die in faith does not always mean that we die calmly, without fear and doubt.

For instance, the renowned biblical scholar, Raymond E. Brown, commenting on the fear of death inside the community of the Beloved disciple, writes: “The finality of death and the uncertainties it creates causes trembling among those who have spent their lives professing Christ. Indeed, among the small community of Johannine disciples, it was not unusual for people to confess that doubts had come into their minds as they encountered death. … The Lazarus story is placed at the end of Jesus’ public ministry in John to teach us that when confronted with the visible reality of the grave, all need to hear and embrace the bold message that Jesus proclaimed: ‘I am the life.’ … For John, no matter how often we renew our faith, there is the supreme testing by death. Whether the death of a loved one or one’s own death, it is the moment when one realizes that it all depends on God. During our lives we have been able to shield ourselves from having to face this in a raw way. Confronted by death, mortality, all defenses fall away.”

Sometimes people with a deep faith face death in calm and peace. But sometimes they don’t and the fear and doubt that threatens them then is not necessarily a sign of a weak or faltering faith. It can be the opposite, as we see in Jesus. Inside a person of faith, fear and doubt in the face of death is what the mystics call ‘the dark night of the spirit” … and this is what’s going on inside that experience: The raw fear and doubt we are experiencing at that time make it impossible for us to mistake our own selves and our own life-force for God. When we have to accept to die in trust, inside of what seems like absolute negation and can only cry out in anguish to an apparent emptiness, then it is no longer possible to confuse God with our own feelings and ego. In that, we experience the ultimate purification of soul.
We can have a deep faith and still find ourselves with doubt and fear in the face of death. Just look at Jesus.

(Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser, theologian, teacher and award-winning author, is President of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, Texas. He can be contacted through his website www.ronrolheiser.com. Now on Facebook www.facebook.com/ronrolheiser)

Reflections on Life
By Melvin Arrington
As the year begins to wind down, it’s only natural to look back and reflect on all the memorable moments, both the highs and lows of the last twelve months: births, new friendships, personal achievements, health matters, family gatherings, financial windfalls/setbacks, deaths, community events, natural disasters, etc. But above all, it’s a time for giving thanks.
How quickly our modern world races from Halloween to Christmas! As a result, Thanksgiving has become little more than a brief respite from the mad dash to the big end-of-year holidays. Perhaps it’s because the merchandisers haven’t yet figured out how to market it for more than a day or two. Or maybe the fact that it’s usually considered a low-key, family affair has something to do with it. Now, think about how long we make merry for Halloween. When I was a child it was one day, really just one night, and that was it, but these days it’s practically a whole month of parties and hype, and then on Nov. 1 the big advertising push for Christmas begins.
Even though our culture downplays Thanksgiving, we shouldn’t let that derail our celebration of this important holiday. So, what are we truly grateful for? First and foremost, we should give thanks to God, the One who, according to St. Paul, knew us and loved us and chose us to be His adopted sons and daughters from before the foundation of the world (Ephesians 1:4-5). That means we are adopted members of the family of God! That awe-inspiring statement should cause jaws to drop. I experience a sense of wonder every time I read those verses.
But let’s not forget all the “gifts” we receive every day of our lives, those daily endowments we often take for granted, such as each new day, the sunshine, the rain, water to drink, food to eat. Every breath we take is worth more than silver and gold. Also the treasure of family, friends and health, as well as the freedoms we enjoy in this country, especially our freedom to worship as we please. The list goes on and on. Life itself is a gift.
Did you ever try to recall all your blessings beginning as far back as you can remember? Did you ever attempt to count them? If you’ve ever tried this, you know it’s an impossible task because, since God is infinite, so are His favors; they just keep on coming. I’m reminded of that marvelous story called The Book of Sand, by Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. No matter how many pages the main character flipped over, he never got any nearer to the end of the book. Such is God’s love for us – infinite and unending.
So one of the ways we can respond to these heavenly favors is with prayer, specifically ones of thanksgiving. In the spirit of “Pray without ceasing” (I Thessalonians 5:17) we pray at mealtimes, whether at home or elsewhere. Consider the Norman Rockwell painting “Saying Grace,” which appeared on the cover of the Nov. 24, 1951 issue of the Saturday Evening Post. It shows a young boy and an older woman, perhaps his grandmother, seated at a table in a restaurant. As they bow their heads to ask God to bless the food, the other diners look on, as if they were witnessing something odd or out of the ordinary. If prayer is viewed as an oddity, what does that say about our culture? Is gratitude becoming a lost virtue? Maybe it has already disappeared from sight in some areas of the country.
The act of expressing gratitude, implies the person doing the thanking, the thing he is grateful for and the one he acknowledges for this favor (“Bless us, O Lord, and these Thy gifts”). Giving thanks fulfills a psychological, as well as spiritual need, and completes the circle by joining gift, giver and recipient. All humans have an innate desire to participate in this circle of giving and receiving and expressing appreciation for the gift as well as the giver. It’s part of what it means to be human. No one is sufficient unto himself.
Fr. Romano Guardini calls gratitude a basis for community. We thank our parents for raising us and our teachers for educating us. Also, we give recognition to those who help us when we need assistance and those who give us presents. Theoretically, it’s a concept that encompasses the whole world because everyone has someone to appreciate for something.
This season let’s all give thanks to the ultimate source from whom all good things come and also to those who in some way have enriched our lives.
Gracious God, may we be truly grateful not just this time of year but all year long.

(Melvin Arrington is a Professor Emeritus of Modern Languages for the University of Mississippi and a member of Oxford St. John Parish.)

MAKING A DIFFERENCE
By Tony Magliano
When we pray Christianity’s most important single prayer – The Our Father – do we really attempt to understand and meditate upon the challenge of its words – especially “thy kingdom come?”
What is this kingdom of God that we are asking the Father to bring forth upon the earth? And what part do we play?
To put it in Jesus’ words, “What is the kingdom of God like? To what can I compare it? It is like a mustard seed that a person took and planted in the garden. When it was fully grown, it became a large bush and ‘the birds of the sky dwelt in its branches.’ ”
Giving us another example, Jesus added, “It is like yeast that a woman took and mixed [in] with three measures of wheat flour until the whole batch of dough was leavened.”
The kingdom of God continues to grow large from tiny beginnings like a little mustard seed which becomes a shrub that may reach nine feet high. And a small bit of yeast which stimulates the dough to expand several times its original size.
Therefore, we don’t need to be rich and powerful people to build up God’s kingdom.
But entering in, living in, and laboring to advance the unfolding kingdom of God takes much prayer and great effort on our part. However, we should not be discouraged facing such a huge and difficult task.
A complimentary Chinese proverb encouragingly puts it this way: “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” A great accomplishment, an ambitious goal does not come about easily. It requires much effort. But over the course of time the goal can be reached.
But it will never happen if there is no effort to get started. It will never be accomplished if the first step is not taken. But it is encouraging to know that the great accomplishment, the ambitious goal – the journey of a thousand miles – only takes one step to begin.
The greatest accomplishment, the most ambitious goal that we can pursue, is doing our best to enter evermore deeply into the kingdom of God and advance its wonderful presence in our wounded world.
From abortion to war – and the arms industry which feeds it – from poverty to sickness, from human trafficking to child labor, from homeless people on our streets to fleeing refugees at our borders, from pollution to climate change, from corporate greed to militaristic nationalism countless fellow human beings are enduring tremendous suffering in a world that is largely indifferent to their cries.
But contrary to this indifference, those of us desiring to live in the kingdom of God need to be growing in the fruits of his Holy Spirit – love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control – and to actively use these fruits to end the suffering of our heavy burdened brothers and sisters. And we need to tirelessly work to transform the structures of sin – as St. Pope John Paul II called them – which exist in our culture, government and corporations into structures aiding the building up of God’s kingdom.
Our self-centered kingdoms must go, so that God’s kingdom may grow.
At Sunday Mass and every other time we say the Our Father, may we pray with an ever-fresh compelling desire: “thy kingdom come!”

(Tony Magliano is an internationally syndicated social justice and peace columnist. He is available to speak at diocesan or parish gatherings. Tony can be reached at tmag@zoominternet.net.)

IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI
A friend of mine shares this story. She grew up with five siblings and an alcoholic father. The effect of her father’s alcoholism was devastating on her family. Here’s how she tells the story: By the time my father died his alcoholism had destroyed our family. None of us kids could talk to each other anymore. We’d drifted apart to different parts of the country and had nothing to do with each other. My mother was a saint and kept trying through the years to have us reconcile with each other, inviting us to gather for Thanksgiving and Christmas and the like, but it never worked. All her efforts were for nothing. We hated each other. Then as my mother lay dying of cancer, in hospice, bedridden and eventually in a coma, we gathered by her bedside, watching her die and she, helpless and unable to speak, was able to accomplish what she couldn’t achieve through all those years when she could speak. Watching her die, we reconciled.
We all know similar stories of someone in their dying, when they were too helpless to speak or act, powerfully impacting, more powerfully than they ever did in word or action, those around them, pouring out a grace that blessed their loved ones. Sometimes, of course, this isn’t a question of reconciling a family but of powerfully strengthening their existing unity. Such was the case in a family history shared by Carla Marie Carlson, in her book, Everyday Grace. Her family was already closely-knit, but Carlson shares how her mother’s dying strengthened those family bonds and graced all the others who witnessed her dying: “Those who took the opportunity to be with my Mom during that journey have told me that their lives were forever changed. It was a remarkable time which I will always treasure. Lessons of acceptance and courage were abundant as she struggled with the realities of a dying body. It was dramatic and intense, but yet filled with peace and gratitude.” Most anyone who has ever sat in vigil around a loved one who was dying can share a similar story.
There’s a lesson here and a mystery. The lesson is that we don’t just do important things for each other and impact each other’s lives by what we actively do for each other; we also do life-changing things for each other in what we passively absorb in helplessness. This is the mystery of passivity which we see, paradigmatically, played out in what Jesus did for us.
As Christians, we say that Jesus gave his life for us and that he gave his death for us, but we tend to think of this as one and the same thing. It’s not. Jesus gave his life for us through his activity; he gave his death for us through his passivity. These were two separate movements. Like the woman described earlier who tried for years to have her children reconcile with each through her activity, through her words and actions, and then eventually accomplished that through the helplessness and passivity of her deathbed, so too with Jesus. For three years he tried in every way to make us understand love, reconciliation and faith, without full effect. Then, in less than 24 hours, in his helplessness, when he couldn’t speak, in his dying, we got the lesson. Both Jesus and his mother were able, in their helplessness and passivity, to give the world something that they were unable to give as effectively in their power and activity.
Unfortunately, this is not something our present culture, with its emphasis on health, productivity, achievement and power very much understands. We no longer much understand or value the powerful grace that is given off by someone dying of a terminal illness; nor the powerful grace present in a person with a disability, or indeed the grace that’s present in our own physical and personal disabilities. Nor do we much understand what we are giving to our families, friends and colleagues when we, in powerlessness, have to absorb neglect, slights, and misunderstanding. When a culture begins to talk about euthanasia it’s an infallible indication that we no longer understand the grace within passivity.
In his writings, Henri Nouwen makes a distinction between what he terms our “achievements” and our “fruitfulness.” Achievements stem more directly from our activities: What have we positively accomplished? What have we actively done for others? And our achievements stop when we are no longer active. Fruitfulness, on the other hand, goes far beyond what we have actively accomplished and is sourced as much by what we have passively absorbed as by what we actively produced. The family described above reconciled not because of their mother’s achievements, but because of her fruitfulness. Such is the mystery of passivity.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin in his spiritual classic The Divine Milieu, tells us that we are meant to help the world through both our activities and our passivities, through both what we actively give and through what we passively absorb.

(Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser, theologian, teacher and award-winning author, is President of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, TX. He can be contacted through his website www.ronrolheiser.com. Now on Facebook www.facebook.com/ronrolheiser)

IN SPIRIT AND TRUTH
By Father Aaron Williams
The first four years of my seminary career I lived at St. Joseph Seminary College in St. Benedict, Louisiana, which is also home to a Benedictine Monastery. This allowed me a handful of years to experience the daily recitation of the Divine Office, or the Liturgy of the Hours in its choral form. Every day, several times during the day, the monks at St. Ben’s—like monks and nuns do every day across the world—gather in their church and chant the offices of the Church’s daily prayer which consist of patterns of psalms, hymns and readings. Most Catholics haven’t experienced this, but the daily witness of this chanted office had a great impact on my spirituality as a Catholic and now as a priest. This, especially, since every priest is bound to recite the hours of the Divine Office himself every day under pain of mortal sin. It is actually one of the main promises made at ordination—that the priest will pray all of these offices during the day, every day, for the rest of their lives.
As I continued through seminary, I began reading the documents of Vatican II (something all of us should do since so many people today claim to know what Vatican II said and yet so few have actually read the documents). What surprised me in the Council’s document on the liturgy was that the Council Fathers requested very directly and clearly that the experience I had in seminary of the chanted or common Divine Office be put into the hands of everyone. The Council teaches, “Pastors of souls should see to it that the chief hours, especially Vespers, are celebrated in common in church on Sundays and the more solemn feasts. And the laity, too, are encouraged to recite the divine office, either with the priests, or among themselves, or even individually” (Sacrosanctum Concilium, 100).
Many years ago, around the time of the Council of Trent and before then, it is far more common to find lay people in Church when the offices were being sung. This was probably because there was less to do back then. Even in some countries today, especially in Europe, it is not uncommon to find a parish which offers some offices at least on special feast days. Many of the ancient Cathedrals such as Notre Dame, Westminster Cathedral or St. Peter’s Basilica have resident priests who every day sing all the offices in public.
But, this wasn’t a tradition which caught on that much in the United States. Of all the American Cathedrals, only St. Louis Cathedral in New Orleans ever consistently had a public sung office—and this was probably because of its French roots and, sadly, is not a tradition which continues today. Still, the Second Vatican Council set it out as a goal that lay people experience this side of the worship of the Church. The daily offices of the Liturgy of the Hours make up the larger portion of the daily liturgy of the Church. Though the Mass is of course the most important, when you add all the other daily offices together you see how the Church intends to move the individual in prayer through all the various moments of the day—gently guiding us through the liturgical year.
I always enjoy when we get to Advent in the Divine Office. If you are just attending Mass, even daily, you might not get that feeling of anticipation the Church wants of us. But, the office makes it very clear. Very early on, texts start popping up such as, “Come Lord, and do not delay.” One of my favorite texts of Advent in the Divine Office says, “The Lord is coming soon, and will not be late. If he seems to delay, wait for him, for he will surely come and will not be late.”
St. Philip Neri, a favorite saint of mine, has been dubbed by Pope Francis the “patron saint of the New Evangelization.” One of the reasons he is deserving of this title is his ability to find ways to merge the daily experience of Catholics with the rhythm of the Church’s prayer. St. Philip noticed that Catholics in his day enjoyed good music and food. But, he wanted them to enjoy good preaching, too. So, Philip decided that on some nights of the week, he and some other priests would gather in the Church for the office of Vespers and would invite the faithful. But, not only that, he commissioned all the greatest composers he could find to write the best choral settings of the office. Then, once people were there for the music, albeit not the best reason, he would take the opportunity to capitalize on their presence and present a sermon which was relevant to the needs of the day—often taking a theme or an issue and expounding upon it over several weeks. Finally, everyone would go into the church square and share meal together.
The point is that St. Philip knew that the Church could find a way to weave the daily experience of the faithful with the prayer of the Church and a place that meets is in the Divine Office. How might parishes help fulfill this dream of the Council?

Kneading Faith
By Fran Lavelle
Albert Einstein is quoted to having said, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” It is easy to fall victim to this kind of behavior especially when we do not constantly evaluate goals, processes and outcomes. Without proper reflection, it easy to blame everyone else for failure. This kind of blame game perpetuates the cycle. We are, however, creatures of habit, even when those habits do not deliver the best results. I get it. We like knowing what we know, what is familiar, comfortable and what feels safe. It’s hard to do things differently when what we are doing seems to be OK, right? It is easy to get caught up in an “our way of doing things” mentality. We protest, “it’s the way we’ve always done it” when questioned about a process or method. Afterall, we have a game plan. It’s decades old, but we have a plan. We are right in saying we need a plan; after all, we need a road map to get us where we want to be. But, just like the GPS on our cell phones, often there is more than one route. The fastest route may not be the shortest route. The software of our GPS might be outdated. We might lose cell service. Despite our best efforts we can end up somewhere we had no intention of going. Or, worse yet, never leave for the journey in the first place.

It is understandable when big institutions like the Church fall into this conundrum. Especially when it comes to being creatures of habit. I mean who doesn’t want to work smarter and not harder? But is expedience and limited effort what we are really talking about? Look, I love being Catholic. I love the cadence of liturgy, the predictability of the liturgical seasons, the changes of art, environment and music. I love the universality of the Church! However, the consistency and predictability I so love can easily become a crutch. It is easy to pull out a template for catechesis, liturgy, preaching, RCIA, campus ministry or any of the activities of the Church. When we pull out the same template year after year, it can feel a little like the movie Groundhog’s Day with Bill Murray. What becomes of the “now” when we are re-living the same experience over and over again? What becomes of those moments ripe for discipleship if we are leaning on the crutch of “this is how we do it?”

For example, if someone asked you, “What do I need to do to become Catholic?” how would you respond? How many of us would refer that person to the pastor or the director of the RCIA program? Would we take the time to ask questions about the person’s interest in the faith? Would we offer to go to an RCIA session with them and introduce them to folks we know in the parish? Would we include them in our prayers for their discernment? Or would we tell them to call the church office? They can look the number up.

In my last column I wrote about the response to WWJD? HWLF, He Would Love First. What does “loving first” look like in this example? I looked to the wisdom of Pope Francis, “In catechesis too, we have rediscovered the fundamental role of the first announcement or kerygma, which needs to be the center of all evangelizing activity and all efforts at Church renewal … On the lips of the catechist the first proclamation must ring out over and over: “Jesus Christ loves you; he gave his life to save you; and now he is living at your side every day to enlighten, strengthen and free you.” (Evangelii Gaudium, 164)

Pope Francis often reminds us that we are loved by Jesus Christ. Not simply in a 1970’s smiley face bumper sticker way, but in an intimate, unceasing, unconditional love that is beyond our imagining. What would the world look like if we understood the love of Jesus and behaved like we are worthy of such love? How would our response to the inquiry in the above example change if all we cared about was inviting people into a relationship with Christ? Would our words convey his love for them?

`If you feel like you are stuck on the hamster wheel of “this is what we do,” you are not alone. If what I’ve described looks like faith formation in your parish, you are not alone. This is not a Jackson Diocese problem. This is an issue that catechists, pastors and bishops face all over the country. If we are to change the narrative of Einstein’s quote, the mind set for what we are doing must change. Our faith journey is not about finding the right program, DVD series, youth ministry hacks or religious education book series. Yes, we need tools to support our catechesis. But it is crazy making behavior to present the same material year after year if we are not engaging in our own relationship with Jesus and walking with those we serve as they discover Christ and his love for them. I encourage everyone to look at the ministries of your parish and ask how can we invite people to greater intimacy with Jesus?

IN EXILE
By Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI
In a remarkable book, The Inner Voice of Love, written while he was in a deep emotional depression, Henri Nouwen shares these words: “The great challenge is living your wounds through instead of thinking them through. It is better to cry than to worry, better to feel your wounds deeply than to try to understand them, better to let them enter into your silence than to talk about them. The choice you face constantly is whether you are taking your hurts to your head or to your heart. In your head you analyze them, find their causes and consequences, and coin words to speak and write about them. But no final healing is likely to come from that source. You need to let your wounds go down into your heart. Then you can live them through and discover that they will not destroy you. Your heart is greater than your wounds.”

He’s right; your heart is greater than your wounds, though it needs caution in dealing with them. Wounds can soften your heart; but they can also harden you heart and freeze it in bitterness. So what’s the path here? What leads to warmth and what leads to coldness?

In a remarkable essay, The Drama of the Gifted Child, the Swiss psychologist, Alice Miller, tells us what hardens the heart and what softens it. She does so by outlining a particular drama that commonly unfolds in many lives. For her, giftedness does not refer to intellectual prowess but to sensitivity. The gifted child is the sensitive child. But that gift, sensitivity, is a mixed blessing. Positively, it lets you feel things more deeply so that the joys of living will mean more to you than to someone who is more callous. That’s its upside.

Conversely, however, if you are sensitive you will habitually fear disappointing others and will forever fear not measuring up. And your inadequacy to always measure up will habitually trigger feelings of anxiety and guilt within you. As well, if you are extraordinarily sensitive, you will tend to be self-effacing to a fault, letting others have their way while you swallow hard as your own needs aren’t met and then absorb the consequences. Not least, if you feel things deeply you will also feel hurt more deeply. That’s the downside of sensitivity and makes for the drama that Alice Miller calls the “drama of the gifted child,” the drama of the sensitive person.

Further, in her view, for many of us that drama will only begin to really play itself out in our middle and later years, constellating in frustration, disappointment, anger and bitterness, as the wounds of our childhood and early adulthood begin to break through and overpower the inner mechanisms we have set up to resist them. In mid-life and beyond, our wounds will make themselves heard so strongly that our habitual ways of denial and coping no longer work. In mid-life you realize that your mother did love your sister better than you, that your father in fact didn’t care much about you and that all those hurts you absorbed because you swallowed hard and played the stoic are still gnawing away bitterly inside you. That’s how the drama eventually culminates, in a heart that’s angry.

So where does that leave us? For Alice Miller, the answer lies in grieving. Our wounds are real and there is nothing we can do about them, pure and simple. The clock can’t be turned back. We cannot relive our lives so as to provide ourselves with different parents, different childhood friends, different experiences on the playground, different choices and a different temperament. We can only move forward so as to live beyond our wounds. And we do that by grieving. Alice Miller submits that the entire psychological and spiritual task of midlife and beyond is that of grieving, mourning our wounds until the very foundations of our lives shake enough so that there can be transformation.

A deep psychological scar is the same as having some part of your body permanently damaged in an accident. You will never be whole again and nothing can change that. But you can be happy again; perhaps more happy than ever before. But that loss of wholeness must be grieved, or it will manifest itself in anger, bitterness and jealous regrets.

The Jesuit music composer and spiritual writer, Roc O’Connor, makes the same point, with the added comment that the grieving process also calls for a long patience within which we need to wait long enough so that the healing can occur according to its own natural rhythms. We need, he says, to embrace our wounded humanity and not act out. What’s helpful, he suggests, is to grieve our human limitations. Then we can endure hunger, emptiness, disappointment and humiliation without looking for a quick fix – or for a fix at all. We should not try to fill our emptiness too quickly without sufficient waiting.
And we won’t ever make peace with our wounds without sufficient grieving.

(Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser, theologian, teacher and award-winning author, is President of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, TX. He can be contacted through his website www.ronrolheiser.com. Now on Facebook www.facebook.com/ronrolheiser)

FROM THE HERMITAGE
By sister alies
“Not all who wander are lost.” I’m not sure who said that but it fits well into my life and perhaps yours. Deep in the psyche of each person is a wanderer, someone who travels, someone who is on the move. In our faith-life we also wander, partly as we mature and partly by circumstances bringing us great joy or difficulty!
Pilgrimage, wandering, on the road again is a very ancient image and is certainly formative in our Catholic Christian tradition. The Israelites wandered in the desert for 40 years over terrain taking only 11 days to walk! Monks or prisoners sitting in their cells wander many miles each day as they pray. Francis, Dominic and their mendicants wandered all over meeting the poor, never quite sure how they might make ends meet. Today a great number of sisters and brothers, refugees, wander from place to place, country to country, looking for a place of safety and welcome, a chance to start again.
Having just celebrated the feast of St. Teresa of Avila we might be reminded of other sorts of prayerful wandering … into ‘interior castles,’ ’mansions’ or ‘a palace where God dwells.’
What of repentance as a sort of wandering … since the word reminds us to ‘turn around?’ As we follow a path not set for us, God will intervene in one way or another to suggest that if we continue to go in that direction, things might not work out so well. Angelus Silesius in Cherubinic Wanderer, says on page 47: “Go where you cannot go; see what you cannot see; hear where there is no sound, you are where God does speak.” Mysterious and koan-like. The path of this wanderer would seem to be the exact opposite of what one might think is ‘right.’
Or another example, an anguished path when one is experiencing fear connected to death … how does one keep going and where is that going to? We might say quite easily, when we’re not afraid, that the path leads to heaven and we can by faith, hope it does. This path, sunk deep in our interior, has to be followed carefully and faithfully, looking at Jesus and not the fear. Remember the “devil prowls around …” (1 Peter 5:8).
“Death is our constant companion, and it is death that gives each person’s life its true meaning. But in order to see the real face of our death, we first have to know all of the anxieties and terrors that the simple mention of its name is able to evoke in any human being,” says Paulo Coelho in his book, The Pilgrimage. Imagine the winding path through Gethsemane … the path up to the Cross … the walk toward the tomb. Here is the human experience, an experience of diminishment or of apparent folly.
As the autumn falls around you, look around and see all the winding paths nearby. See the roads or the tiny traces through the under bush. Look for the flight patterns of the raptors or the few hummingbirds still around. As the leaves color and fall, one sees the mighty trees and the little paths into them, as squirrels and other little critters hide their goods for the winter. What have we put aside that will nourish us when our journey becomes difficult? What have we hidden deep in the recesses of our hearts that will help us when all seems lost? What actually matters? What gives meaning to life?
One of the classics that helps remind me of some answers to those questions is in the The Way of a Pilgrim, (translated by H. Nacovcin), a 19th century Russian work. The story is about a young Russian peasant-pilgrim with a deep question in his heart: how does one pray constantly? The text and the one that follows it, The Pilgrim Continues His Way, both challenge one to reflect on just how serious our pilgrimage is. Indeed, he travels a lot, has a spiritual father and discovers some answers. Father Walter Ciszek, S.J. wrote the forward of this edition and says: “The Pilgrim was most receptive to this valuable knowledge about prayer (the Jesus Prayer), for he had earnestly been searching for as method of prayer that would satisfy his longing for uninterrupted communion with God … he spared no effort …”
Here is the real answer … he spared no effort. If we want to discover that deep joy, establish a real faith life, live out of a hope carved in the soil of our hearts…then we must spare no effort. All who wander aren’t lost if the wandering is a search for the Living God … isn’t this the longing of every pilgrims’ heart?

GUEST COLUMN
By Deacon John McGregor
Over the past 50 years, the Catholic Church has placed an extraordinary emphasis on the laity’s role to evangelize their everyday environment. Pope Paul VI in his encyclical, Evangelization in the Modern World, writes that “she [the Church] exists in order to evangelize.” (14) Clearly, the renewal of the missionary impulse can be seen in the documents flowing out of the Second Vatican Council and those subsequent to the Council.
However, lay Catholics often feel inadequately prepared to evangelize and in fact confuse evangelization with certain forms of apologetics, which in fact, may be useful for winning arguments but not very useful in bringing others to Christ. And bringing others to an encounter with the Person of Jesus Christ is precisely the work of evangelization. Still, many lay Catholics, themselves, have never been evangelized, making the work of sharing one’s faith in a pluralistic culture extremely difficult or nearly impossible, especially one that is largely populated by a non-Catholic prevailing religious ethos and an increasing number of secularists. The old saying, “you can’t give what you don’t have” comes to mind.
So, if evangelization is about bringing others to an encounter with the Person of Jesus Christ, then maybe what is needed is a means of inviting others into a neutral environment where they can deeply consider, possibly for the first time, the real meaning of life, the real reason we are here, how to begin anew after all that has happened in their life, and how Christ provides the answer to all of life’s enduring questions.
To this end, of creating a neutral place where a person can honestly ask questions and voice disbelief, all without anyone judging them, our parish at St. Jude Pearl has begun using the Alpha course. Our first Alpha, earlier this year, included about 34 guests, most of whom were members of St. Jude. However, our second Alpha has over 40 guests and more than a dozen are non-parishioners. Additionally, St. Jude is running a Youth Alpha with over 30 young people participating.
Alpha was developed in the 1970s by the Anglican Church as a way to help those who were unchurched or who had simply drifted away from the church to hear the fundamental message of salvation – the kerygma. Alpha has had wide success throughout the world and has been used in over 100 countries, is available in 100 different languages and has been experienced by more than 24 million people. Alpha has found great success in the Catholic Church and is lauded by such renowned Catholic figures as Father Raniero Cantalamessa, the preacher to the papal household, Father Mike Schmitz, who regularly produces podcasts for Ascension press and by many bishops and archbishops in the United States and worldwide.
So Alpha is Catholic and ecumenical, precisely because it focuses on the fundamentals of the Christian faith: God loves you, unconditionally; Jesus is the human manifestation of God; and Jesus’ death and resurrection has reconciled the world to God.
So how does an Alpha work? It begins with a meal, followed by a short video (less than 30 minutes), followed by table discussion and sharing (for about another 45 minutes). There is never any force applied, nor coercion used. Guests attending Alpha are invited to share whatever they think, to be heard without being judged and to be invited to encounter Jesus, where they are, as they are. Alpha can be run in a parish center, at a university meeting room, in someone’s home, almost anywhere. And all of the videos, discussion materials and training materials can be downloaded absolutely free at www.alphausa.org.
Alpha provides a framework and a neutral environment for inviting people to encounter Jesus Christ. Lay Catholics, who feel uncomfortable witnessing to others in their everyday environment may feel a lot more comfortable simply inviting their friends and coworkers to an Alpha. “What’s an Alpha?” they may ask. One can reply, “It’s simply a place where we share a meal, watch a video and discuss life’s most important questions, all in an environment where nobody will judge you or criticize you for your answers.” In this environment, one’s friends or coworkers will have an opportunity to encounter the Person of Jesus Christ and in doing so, we will be actively participating in the Great Commission given by Jesus to the whole Church, “Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations.” (Matthew 28:19)

(Deacon John McGregor of St. Jude Pearl is the director of the permanenat diaconate and director of operations for the Diocese of Jackson.)